A strategic decision-maker making a decision such as “Should Company A acquire Company B” wants as much relevant and objective analysis as possible, to contribute to making educated and better decisions. These data and analyses include answering what is the technology fit between two companies in one or more areas. Other types of decisions that this tool can be used to assess include, but are not limited to: (1) deciding upon a joint venture with one or more companies or parties compared to others; (2) deciding whether to license existing technology in a field, or, to try to develop new technology in fields of intent on one's own with research and development (R&D) funds. It would be very desirable to have a decision-aid process and tool of this type.
A related type of analysis applicable to large organizations, such as the armed forces or large corporations, would utilize human resource data to form a team of the best people for an upcoming project. The strategic formulation of teams based on past performance on similar projects, publication of internal or external activities, and other available human resource data would be advantageous to the large organizations.
There are existing software search tools or programs which can locate patents based on words or phrases which the tool finds in the full text, claims, front page(s) or other aspects of the patents. There are existing software search tools or programs, which can locate patents based on their patent classes or citation references. There are literature search tools, which examine a database of publications and find citations bearing on words or phrases used as search criteria. There are search tools associated with a variety of databases, which one accesses, for example, through a vendor or over the web. These search engines typically review the results of one search result at a time. Some have capabilities to compare two or more search results. In all cases the primary metric is count of records. However, more capability is required for the analysis and scoring, not based on record count alone, of data fields acquired by such search terms. The ability to capture a forward-looking projection or predictive matrix in analyzing data would be useful. A definite need exists for a decision-aid tool that can make comparisons across multiple different searches based on analysis and scores calculated on multiple characteristics of the data.
A strategic decision-aid, therefore, which provides search and analysis ability across multiple searches and also has projection would be extremely useful across a reasonably large number of applications.